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Rabbit's Feet, Hatches, and Monsters: Mysteries vs. Questions in J. J. Abrams’s Stories
- The University Press of Kentucky
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255 rabbIt’s feet, hatChes, and Monsters Mysteries vs. Questions in J. J. Abrams’s Stories Paul DiRado Mission: Impossible III begins, strangely enough, at what seems to be the end. Ethan Hunt is tied up and held captive by an unnamed bad guy. This bad guy tells Ethan that unless he gives up the location of the mysterious-sounding Rabbit’s Foot, a tied-up and gagged woman (with whom the audience is led to believe Ethan has a romantic relationship) will be killed. When Ethan either can’t or won’t reveal this information to the bad guy, the woman is shot, and the film cuts back several weeks earlier, to a party being held by Ethan and the murdered woman. The remainder of the film is haunted by this first scene, and we (the audience) spend most of this time trying to figure out how the ordinary and everyday circumstances in which the characters originally find themselves will lead them to the tragic moment with which the film begins. In that respect, Mission: Impossible III is structured as a mystery. We know that Ethan will wind up captured by the bad guy, but we don’t know how—given his retirement to civilian life—his capture will occur. And much of the fun of Mission: Impossible III comes from trying to figure out this mystery. Looking at the projects on which J. J. Abrams has worked, it seems clear that he is quite intrigued by mysteries of all kinds. In many of his movies, including Mission: Impossible III and Cloverfield, and especially in his TV work—Alias, Lost, and Fringe—resolving a mystery is an important task both for his characters and for the audience. What is that thing terrorizing New York? What are the true motives of Sydney Bristow’s secretive agency? Why is there a polar bear on the island? For the characters, resolving these mysteries is often a matter of life and death. For the audience, the overwhelm- 256 Paul DiRado ing desire to figure things out keeps our attention glued to the screen and makes us come back week after week to discover another clue. Because of their centrality to his works, studying the mysteries in J. J. Abrams’s TV shows and movies offers us a good opportunity to philosophically understand precisely what a mystery is and what will count as a satisfactory resolution to a mystery. This question is of no small importance to our ordinary lives. Though the mysteries we encounter in everyday life are a bit more mundane than the ones facing Jack and the castaways in Lost, we are confronted with mysteries both big and small all the time. We may feel suddenly sick and wonder what precisely is ailing us and what we should do to feel better. Or perhaps a friend has suddenly started acting coldly to me—why? Was it something I did? Our task in this chapter will be to figure out precisely what a mystery is and what sorts of resolutions to mysteries one could reasonably expect to find. This also has been a task of a great many scientists, philosophers, and other thinkers throughout history, from both the East and West.1 First, we will distinguish mysteries from questions. This distinction is necessary because an unanswered question will initially appear to be the cause of something appearing mysterious. We will show that a mystery is not reducible to an unanswered question, or even a set of unanswered questions. This result is quite important, as it will reveal that you cannot expect a mystery about some topic to necessarily be resolved by merely answering previously unanswered questions about that topic. People who complained that shows like Lost or Fringe never answered any questions are not entirely correct—those shows actually answered a great many questions, but they did so without ever resolving the mystery underlying those questions. With this revelation established, we will turn toward the question of what precisely does make something mysterious, if not an unanswered question, and how the resolution of a mystery will look different than the answering of a question. Are Mysteries and Questions the Same Thing? The first thing we need to determine is precisely what we mean by a mystery and how a mystery differs from a question, if at all. Let us start with questions. Mission: Impossible III begins, as we have discussed, with the big bad guy named Davian asking Ethan Hunt about the...